Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Mono

Yay! Got the debugger to work (this is 2.0).

This is a very nice development environment.
One of the guys in my department sent me an xlsx file today - 36MB, of staff with heavy disk space usage.

The shares are all on a Linux box.

du * -sh | sort -an


Produced a file under 5K in size with pretty much the same information in the same order.

So what was in the 36MB file (which, incidentally, crashed my version of Excel)?
The upgrade mess-up

WinZip did the right thing. I emailed them. Within a couple of hours I had my original WinZip9 key and a URL to download it.

Now that's neat. I might have been tempted to download winzip14, but

  • There isn't much difference
  • 14 is a LOT bigger than 9
  • jZip and PeaZip and a lot of others work. And work well.
  • 9 does it for me.
So there we are. Decent firm, did the biz.

But how many other utilities and software bits on my PC can't I upgrade? And how many can I? Textpad, a very fine utility, is still allowing me to upgrade and I'm several major versions down the line.

Monday, March 29, 2010

Never upgrade when you're not sure...

I have (had) a registered version of Winzip 11. No problems with it, but thought upgrading was worth it. Not sure whether I was "allowed" to upgrade, so downloaded a copy of the latest version and dropped  it into a different folder.

Then, of course, the new version asks me to register. Not being sure what was what, I tried my old registration code (gleaned from the help screen on the other version of winzip). Didn't work of course.  Do I want to carry on with a trial? Click yes.

Only now my registered version of WinZip is no longer registered.


And, of course, I haven't got a note of the registration key. And neither has WinZip.....

Friday, March 26, 2010

That's the way to do it. Writing a small utility app in C# for work. On Windows, of course, under .NET 3.5. Get the app running nicely and, just for interest, realise it ought to run on Mono (that's the binary, not recompiling the source).

So, copy the app to a Linux box, and, whoa, it runs perfectly under mono. No recompile, no downloads. It just runs. Perfectly.


By the way, I use SharpDevelop. It's neat, small, fast and free.